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So these new net books to be released Thursday... Linux OS on them. Anyone able to find out if the NIC will be backtrack friendly? >.<

engadgetmobile dot com has the link (I cant post links yet sorry)

I've been holding out on the netbook craze (mostly because I'm a poor student), but these may actually come out at the $300 price that the eee was listed at first.

You couldn't pay me to use any of the Inspiron series from Dell. In general I like Dell stuff, but the entire Inspiron line has been troublesome.

A third party security audit is the IT equivalent of a colonoscopy. It's long, intrusive, very uncomfortable, and when it's done, you'll have seen things you really didn't want to see, and you'll never forget that you've had one.

You couldn't pay me to use any of the Inspiron series from Dell. In general I like Dell stuff, but the entire Inspiron line has been troublesome.

Yea, they usually have non-linux friendly hardware. It will most likely have some broadcom chipset that needs ndis drivers.

Of course, if you really wanted to have some fun, go to Wal-Mart late at night and ask the greeter if they could help you find trashbags, roll of carpet, rope, quicklime, clorox and a shovel. See if they give you any strange looks. --Streaker69

Yea, they usually have non-linux friendly hardware. It will most likely have some broadcom chipset that needs ndis drivers.

I just installed CentOS on my Gateway machine with a Broadcom 4306 card installed, and did not use NDIS at all. I was actually quite surprised when it just worked in a couple of simple steps.

Install NetworkManager 0.6.5
Install WPA_Supplicant (whatever the latest version is)
Use BCM43xx-FWCutter to extract the firmware from the windows driver (you'd need to get this driver from whatever source ya can)
Copy the extracted firmware to /lib/firmware
do a chkconfig NetworkManager on
do a service NetworkManager start

viola, the Broadcom card works without NDIS, and you can connect to WPA networks without issue both from CLI and Gnome.

A third party security audit is the IT equivalent of a colonoscopy. It's long, intrusive, very uncomfortable, and when it's done, you'll have seen things you really didn't want to see, and you'll never forget that you've had one.

I just installed CentOS on my Gateway machine with a Broadcom 4306 card installed, and did not use NDIS at all. I was actually quite surprised when it just worked in a couple of simple steps.

Install NetworkManager 0.6.5
Install WPA_Supplicant (whatever the latest version is)
Use BCM43xx-FWCutter to extract the firmware from the windows driver (you'd need to get this driver from whatever source ya can)
Copy the extracted firmware to /lib/firmware
do a chkconfig NetworkManager on
do a service NetworkManager start

viola, the Broadcom card works without NDIS, and you can connect to WPA networks without issue both from CLI and Gnome.

I thought that was ndis?

Of course, if you really wanted to have some fun, go to Wal-Mart late at night and ask the greeter if they could help you find trashbags, roll of carpet, rope, quicklime, clorox and a shovel. See if they give you any strange looks. --Streaker69

NDIS is not loaded on the machine, so if just putting the firmware in that directory is using NDIS, that would be news to me. I had previously gone through the steps of installing NDIS and doing all the fun stuff with getting Broadcom's to work, but this last time, I just did the steps shown above and didn't have any issues.

A third party security audit is the IT equivalent of a colonoscopy. It's long, intrusive, very uncomfortable, and when it's done, you'll have seen things you really didn't want to see, and you'll never forget that you've had one.

Actually, I just did for real about 15 minutes ago, SMTP for some reason just stop sending mail from certain accounts.

A third party security audit is the IT equivalent of a colonoscopy. It's long, intrusive, very uncomfortable, and when it's done, you'll have seen things you really didn't want to see, and you'll never forget that you've had one.

You couldn't pay me to use any of the Inspiron series from Dell. In general I like Dell stuff, but the entire Inspiron line has been troublesome.

A couple years ago I had a Dell latitude die on me. I called Dell and had a tech come out (free because of the warranty). He took the thing apart and replaced the motherboard. The new system booted but said Inspiron. I pointed this out thinking he installed the wrong motherboard. He said not worry, he had the right motherboard. He called a special Dell tech support number, received a special bios, flashed the system and magically it was now latitude again. I was nervous about windows needing reactivation, but windows came up, detected the network card, and everything was fine. No hassles whatsoever.

A couple years ago I had a Dell latitude die on me. I called Dell and had a tech come out (free because of the warranty). He took the thing apart and replaced the motherboard. The new system booted but said Inspiron. I pointed this out thinking he installed the wrong motherboard. He said not worry, he had the right motherboard. He called a special Dell tech support number, received a special bios, flashed the system and magically it was now latitude again. I was nervous about windows needing reactivation, but windows came up, detected the network card, and everything was fine. No hassles whatsoever.

I have personally seen several Inspirons self destruct due to overheating, but I have never seen a lattitude do the same thing.

Plus, while the motherboards may be the same, the rest of the machine is different. The Inspirons in my opinion, just feel as though they're made cheap. The hinges for the panel are cheap, the whole machine feels like it flexes if you pick it up by one corner. Whereas the Lattitudes feel like they're built better, a bit more robust. Of course, that could just be perception as well, but I've had better luck with Lattitude than with Inspirons.

Now, here's something really funny (peculiar, not haha): My sister wanted to buy a laptop for her daughter to take to college. She had previously purchased an Inspiron for her other daughter that died due to overheating, since it was out of warranty, Dell wanted to charge a good bit to fix it, so they left it sit. So my sister decided to try out the Lattitudes for her other daughter. It took her about 10 phone calls to Dell to purchase it because they didn't want to sell a Lattitude to an individual, they only want to sell them to businesses. IMO, why should they care? Someone wants to pay for a premium machine, they shouldn't be bitching where the money comes from, they should just be happy that someone is willing to still do business with them after the issues with the previous machine.

A third party security audit is the IT equivalent of a colonoscopy. It's long, intrusive, very uncomfortable, and when it's done, you'll have seen things you really didn't want to see, and you'll never forget that you've had one.